Greatest hits compilations can be a hard sell since a fan of the series might say "big deal, I've played all these games before" but the beauty of Gold lies in the hardware it was released on. Getting a WarioWare on the 3DS, a system that can emulate both the gyro controls of Twisted and the touch screen of Touched, was a stroke of genius - even if it occurred late in the system's lifespan - and the way it accumulates into an absolutely frantic finale where you're switching between 3 different play styles on the fly was a real "This is why I love video games as a art medium" moment. If you're going to use console gimmicks for your video game, might as well go this hard with them, and if you can, please play this beautiful game on an actual 3DS system. This is where Gold shines. like gold

In a way, WarioWare Gold is an amazing send-off, both for the handheld WarioWare games and the 3DS itself. An absolutely exquisite curtain drop for the system before it succumbs to its fatal injuries via poorly selling remakes, and I'm saying this about a game where Wario gains godlike powers by wearing a communal toilet on his head and tries to murder a small child in front of a stadium full of people while doing so (in makes sense in context, I promise, and also it's unclear if the communal toilet itself has godlike powers or if Wario gave himself godlike powers via the placebo effect).

Oh, and to sweeten the deal, once you collect all the souvenirs, the game slaps you on the back and says "well done, now you get this mildly addicting collectible card game where you play rock-paper-scissors against those random freaks from the minigames". This game rules.

Really not a fan of the fact that 3 of the 4 latest Crash Bandicoot games are (or, in this case, were) battle pass grindfests that want you to turn the marsupial into a side-job as you work the long hours for your free-to-play cosmetics, all while a frog in boiling water scenario is playing out where the releases have been steadily becoming online-only after the success of CTRNF, a game with a "seven dollars gets you 700 Bandicoot Bux!" cosmetics store that at least was still a full game that could be played offline.

But hey, at least they brought back Mr. Crumb from the obscure Tiger electronics game and did a crossover with The Noid at one point, which means that Crash Bandicoot has canonically interacted with a Domino's pizza.

Similar to how the Animal Crossing villagers used to insult your weight and steal your stuff in the first installment, Cooking Mama used to be a weird bully who would call you a bitch because you didn't peel three potatoes perfectly under an oppressive time limit.

While this does give the original Cooking Mama more of a personality than the sequels, I also don't like being stressed out while making pixel art spaghetti. I definitely prefer the defanged Cooking Mama of the 3DS era to the original "if I see one lettuce leaf break then it's a bronze medal" Cooking Mama.

Richard Horvitz voicing Spike in the US/NTSC dub couldn't save this one, I'm afraid.

I've long heard tale from other people of the Ape Escape remake that sucked, and...yeah, they were right. I will be nice to this clunky adaptation and say that I actually prefer the button taps for Sky Flyer and Dash Hoop over twirling the second control stick, but I can't shake off my "look at how they massacred my boy" gut reaction for this remake. Valiant effort to make this portable! Wish it wasn't trash!

It's still a version of Ape Escape, so the skeleton of a banger game still exists, but hot damn they ruined most of the gadgets. It's bad enough that the Stun Club and the Time Net have their movement severely limited from "move second control stick freely and gracefully" to "tap button once to do the same pathetic swing over and over with zero variation", but they seriously expect me to control the RC Car with a D pad?! Why not ask me to rub my ass with sandpaper while I'm here?

This game also makes the interesting choice of making the graphic and sound design somehow worse than the PS1 original. The graphics are your traditional "upscale the PS1 polygons but somehow making the colors muddier in the process" fare of the 2000's era of remakes, and the music is mostly left intact with the occasional Interesting Choice (Crumbling Castle, this is about you), but the sound mixing is where things get really fucked. Great idea to give Spike the loudest footsteps in all of gaming and have his footsteps sound wet somehow. Even better idea to have the explosion noises go from "too quiet" to "WAY TOO FUCKING LOUD".

Great game to give to an Ape Escape fan if you absolutely despise them. You can even say "What's wrong? I thought you LIKED Ape Escape?" as the twinkle forever leaves their eye during a failed net swing that would've been completely doable on the PS1.

At least you can Platinum this game on PS Plus Premium at a mere 60% completion on your save file since there's absolutely no "catch all the monkeys" trophies. This is a blessing in disguise.

Every single episode of SBCG4AP is a ray of sunshine in a cold, desolate world that puts a smile on my face. Homestar Runner is the balm to a wounded soul. That being said, if you asked me which of the five episodes was my least favorite, I would say this one with zero hesitation.

Don't get me wrong! It’s still super funny and I love all the callbacks! This game just also makes it abundantly clear that Homestar Runner works best when you have this rich cast of disturbed weirdos bouncing insults off of one another and unfortunately we lose some of that when some of the cast (Marzipan and King of Town, mainly) is rendered mute after being possessed by video game characters.

I will say, props to this game for having some really obscure video game references. I was not expecting a joke about LOAD“FILE”,8,1 or Hard Hat Mack.

With the 32-bit sprite work, the PS1 era soundtrack, and the cheesy 90's era voice acting tickling your brain and Mega Man possessing the ability to have the Buster and a Special weapon selected at the same time, you might be fooled into thinking that this is going to be one of the crown jewels of the Classic Mega Man lineup for the first couple of minutes. Sadly, it doesn't take long for the Blue Bomber's physics to start to feel sluggish and floaty with all of his extra animation frames, because it's right around that time when the game starts to flood the screen with so many moving enemy and explosion sprites that the game dissolves into visual noise.

Still a fine Mega Man all the same. I'm just happy that the Internet only makes fun of Dr. Wahwee, Rwmega Man, and JUMP JUMP SLIDE SLIDE because that means that Aqua Man's handsome guy intro got to be a complete surprise for me.

Also shout-out to the Mega Man Legacy Collection 2 version of this game for removing the red cross on the "Heal Mega Man completely" Rush item and turning it into a mysterious white box, meaning I was trying to beat the last two bosses of this game on one health bar like a chump. Capcom changing this in a rerelease means that they're aware that the original version of Mega Man 8 violated the Geneva Convention!

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Best MM8 Robot Master - Aqua Man clears, but I also appreciate Astro Man for being programmed with anxiety.
Worst MM8 Robot Master - Saying "Clown Man" is too easy and also isn't true. The implications of Search Man's double-headed state of existence makes him the worst for me, but I'm saying this out of pity as opposed to hatred.

While this isn't the worst game I've ever played on the PS Plus service, this certainly was the most miserable game to Platinum. I love any game that hands me a gun and tells me it's an ~advanced futuristic gun~ only for you enter combat and it takes ten bullets to kill the lowliest grunt. I also love completely linear games that somehow try to work in a bullshit collectible system so the game punishes you for triggering story events before you checked every single corner in every single room. Love it. Perfect.

Cool art direction though, even if it's in service to one of the most barebones cyberpunk settings I've ever seen. It almost made the second playthrough worth it. Almost. (also shout-out to the Brazillian guy who wrote the only 100% guide for this game on Steam, you're a real one)

If you stick with this game long enough to get past the weak opening act (which, judging by the trophy percentages, turned off a LOT of people), there is a neat little water physics and AI plotting puzzle-strategy in here. Vessel really shines once you've unlocked multiple types of colorful goo and can start guiding different blobs with different behaviors to specific switches and machines like melted Lemmings.

Unfortunately, since this is a physics-based puzzle platformer in the PS3 era, this means that sometimes you'll be stuck on a puzzle for over an hour because the water refuses to behave in the same way twice and sometimes you'll die because some particles of lava decided to wiggle in a corner and then launch at your sunburnt Murdoc Niccals scientist at 500 mph.

Forever salty by how the Ratchet and Clank game that reenacts the plot of Treasure Planet and gives you oodles of goofy, silly pirate content is also the shortest one at only a 2-3 hour runtime. I understand this was meant to be mildly overpriced DLC to tide players over before the release of ACIT but that trap-ridden pirate's cave filled with pilfered booty and dead man tell no tales should've been twice as long.

At least Insomniac understood the value of a good pirate in the ol' character roster and made both Slag and Rusty Pete reoccurring characters starting with this game. I'm glad that Slag inexplicably comes back from the dead and later hosts a radio station in ACIT.

Pulling a Trophy Hunting Pro Gamer Move™ getting this game's Platinum mere hours before it left the PS Plus service when I rarely play stealth games was An Experience, let me tell you. I am now fully acquainted with the finicky 100% requirements of El Hijo, whether I like it or not.

First, the positives. The art, level design, art direction, and music are all just incredible. The way this game looked was what pulled me in and caused me to make my dumb "hmm perhaps I shall complete this before it leaves the service" decision after all. There's a very consistent spaghetti western meets late 2010's animated TV show visual aesthetic throughout the entire game, where it oozes atmosphere and charm in every stitch. It's a gorgeous game, and the choices in color with the lighting and the uses of yellows and blues are simply stellar.

El Hijo's world and story unfolds entirely without dialogue, and to El Hijo's credit, this works. Once the mom leaves her child at a monastery so that she can go extract Wild West Revenge on the bandits who destroyed her home without her boyson catching a bullet between the eyes, El Hijo of course escapes and we get a steady reveal that the monastery isn't actually the safe haven that El Hijo's mom thought it would be and that it's, in reality, actually a weird front for corpse experimentation, weapons manufacturing, and child slavery. ("Whoops!") Then you get to see mom and son's paths converge as the levels progress and it accumulates with every bad guy in the game joining forces in a weird tag team of monks and outlaws before a plucky kid and his slingshot takes them all down. The story is simple and kid-friendly, but it's executed pretty well, and you even get a cute "Kid Power" ending where the enslaved children join forces and fight off the big, mean adults.

And then there's the gameplay...

There are many indie games where the art style and presentation are so much cooler than actually playing the game. Style over substance, the common complaint of cool-looking first releases by new, small studios. El Hijo is sadly one of them.

This is an exploratory stealth game, and this game's brand of stealth is completely nonviolent and focused on finding the one optimal route in a given level. You cannot take down enemies for good, you can only temporarily slow them down. At first, Little Sonboy must use shadows to sneak past the guards and throw rocks to create diversions, but eventually you unlock more weapons like a smoke bomb made out of cactus pollen and fireworks to stun enemies. On the one hand, I liked the feeling of progression and watching Little Boyson become More Sneaky™, but as a result, the last 1/4th of the game where you have access to the fireworks just feels funner to play because now you have more sneaking options than just "wait in one place until guard walks past your hiding spot".

Sadly, that was a big problem I had with El Hijo. The part of the game where you're in the monastery and feel the most defenseless is also the slowest and longest part of the game, and it's also the part of the game that highlights how brainless the AI can be. As long as Tiny Boykid is in the shadows, he can stand literally inches in front of guards without any worry. Monks are apparently nightblind, despite working in complete darkness being Their Thing. But then, the moment a guard does notices you, this instantly reverses and it's almost always an instant checkpoint restart since they are near impossible to evade as they turn into the goddamn Terminator to take you down. It's doable, but enemies run twice as fast as El Hijo and can be strangely persistent, often phasing through cracks in the wall or pushing past boundaries you swore were impassible. I swear I saw a monastery monk phase through a wall in order to catch me.

I was browsing through the Steam reviews and apparently the controls were worse in a previous release of a game. I can't even imagine how that felt, because the finicky, imprecise controls - in a game where you have to make split-second decisions - are what end up killing me the most. Little Sonboy's stealth controls are all Context Sensitive, giving you the option to crouch or hide when you bump into objects that give you the appropriate stealthing prompt. The game does not give you these prompts instantaneously when you touch a place of cover AND has a tendency to read multiple button prompts at once, meaning that Wee Childman will dive in and out of cover on accident and get caught because you happened to panic a little at an approaching guard.

There's also a bonus objective for Inspiring the various children you find, often locked in chains and forced to do slave labor off the beaten path, scattered throughout the various levels. I get what they're going for with El Hijo's silly antics bringing cheer to these hopeless kids - and sometimes El Hijo DOES save them so that they can move a ladder within reach - but some of these children were placed in very dire places like chained on a desert cliff baking in the sun or forced to build a bridge underneath the supervision of heavily armed soldiers that made me go "hey El Hijo, this kid's gonna die, I don't think the juggling act's gonna cut it this time".

All the kids you save end up showing up in the Epilogue so they supposedly all make it just fine. I still have my doubts about the second kid in Level 12 - The Monastery Station.

But, despite my gripes about the stealth (of which I had many), the aesthetics of the game and that feeling of power I got once I got the cooler weapons were enough to make me Platinum the game. El Hijo had some of the most frustrating moments I've had in a video game all year, but you know what? I saved all the children and got my farm and mom back.

Would I do it all again? Prrrobably not to 100%. But there's definitely Something Here to this game that probably could've been something great if the controls were hammered out more. There's better stealth games out there but El Hijo has HEART. And a slingshot that's kinda hard to target and often won't hit the object you were aiming for.